CALGARY — When Dr. Anna Reid’s mother died suddenly, one week after being diagnosed with acute leukemia, the outgoing president of the country’s largest doctors’ group went into “complete panic.”

Reid’s 87-year-old mother died in the year leading up to her presidency, leaving the Yellowknife physician to take over care of her elderly father, then 92, who suffers from dementia.

Just days after assuming the helm of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) last fall, Reid moved her father with her to Ottawa.

“We tried to look after him at first, but his care needs were so extreme — they’re 24 hours a day — that we put him into a private, assisted living facility with 12 hours a day of extra nursing care,” she told Postmedia News. The pressure on Reid, as well as her partner Linda, became so great, Reid considered resigning as president of the CMA.

Her father is now with Reid in Yellowknife, living in the Stanton Territorial Hospital where Reid works as an emergency physician. His bed costs $842 a day. He’ll be there for another three months until he gets a Northwest Territories health card, and then he will be placed on a waiting list for placement in an appropriate facility. “There’s no choice,” Reid said. “There’s nothing else.”

In a moving valedictory address to delegates at the CMA’s annual meeting here Tuesday, Reid described how her own personal experience mirrors the reality facing growing numbers of Canadians as they deal with their own parents’ end-of-life struggles in a vastly underserved system.

“There’s no doubt that my personal story is one that’s shared by many, many Canadians — maybe not the exact details, but the same caregiver stresses, the same anxiety about families in different areas and the complete lack of resources in many places,” Reid later told reporters.

In addition to making seniors’ care a national priority, Reid told 300 physician delegates that Canadians “want and expect us, the doctors of Canada, to be advocates for their health as well as the health-care system.”

Reid’s one-year tenure took her across the country, including to communities in the northernmost reaches of Quebec, such as Chisasibi on James Bay, where 60 per cent of the population is under age 30 and a shortage of 400 housing units and overcrowding has led to a “cascade of social and health problems.”

She said creative solutions “are being found for some of the most serious issues contributing to the health of our country. At the heart of many of these solutions are physicians.”

Despite doctors’ shortage and wait times and the “endless talk about all that is wrong, there is so much that is right in health care,” she said, “so much to take pride in, and we know that so many of those things begin with the physician.”

“We may, in this room, disagree over some of the details, but at heart what we all want is what is good for our patients. That’s powerful,” she said.